"It was still more unfortunate that in the course of the lectures on Clinical Medicine there was not the slightest allusion to the subject. All sorts of rare diseases—some of which I have not yet met with in the course of twenty-one years of a busy practice—were fully discussed, but we were left entirely ignorant of a subject so vitally important to me personally, and, as it seems to me, to the profession to which I aspired. There might have been an incidental reference to masturbation—although I do not remember it—but its real significance received no attention; and what we students knew of it was the result of our reading or of our personal experiences.
"In the class of Mental Disease there was, naturally, more detailed and systematic reference to facts in the sexual life and to sexual inversion as a rare pathological condition. But still there was not a comforting word to reassure me, growing ever more hopelessly ashamed of what it seemed was a criminal or a gravely morbid nature.
"Among all my fellow-students I knew of no one constituted like myself; but my natural reserve—increased, of course, by my consciousness of what I saw would be thought to be a criminal tendency—did not urge me to exchange of confidences or to the formation of; close friendships.
"After graduation I became a resident medical officer in the hospital and private assistant to one of the professors—a physician and teacher of worldwide reputation. With him I associated on the most cordial and affectionate terms; and often in the course of conversation I tried to bring him to discuss the subject, but without success. It was obviously unpleasant and uninteresting to him. Enough was said, however, to enable me to realize that he held the current ideas on the subject; and I would not for worlds have allowed him, to guess that I myself came under the despised and tainted category.
"I have seldom heard sexual inversion discussed among my professional friends. They speak of it with disgust or amusement. I have never met a professional man who would consider it dispassionately and scientifically. For them it was a subject entirely belonging to psychological medicine.
"I have had no admitted case of it among my patients; but I have often instinctively felt that some who consulted me about other matters would have taken me into their confidence about that, but for their fear of being cruelly misunderstood.
"As to my moral attitude I fear to speak. Grossness disgusts me; but I am not sure that I should be able to resist temptation placed in my way. But I am absolutely sure that I should never, under any circumstances, tempt others to any disgraceful act. If I ever committed any sexual act with one of my own sex whom I loved, I could not look at it or approach it in any other than a sacramental way. This sounds blasphemous and shocking, but I cannot otherwise express my meaning.
"As regards the marriage of inverts, my own feeling is that for a congenital invert—no matter how fully the situation be explained beforehand—it is a step fraught with too great possibilities of tragedy and of the deepest unhappiness, to be advised at all. My view is that for the invert, far more than for the ordinary person, there is no escape from the supreme necessity of self-control in any relationship he may form. If that be attained then the ideal is a relationship with another man of similar temperament—not a platonic one, necessarily—by means of which the highest happiness of both may be reached. But this can occur very seldom.
"To poetry and the fine arts I am very susceptible, and I have given a great deal of time to this study. I am devoted heart and soul to music, which is more and more to me every year I live. Trivial or light music I cannot endure, but of Beethoven, Bach, Händel, Schumann, Schubert, Brahms, Tschaikowsky, and Wagner I should never hear enough. Here, too, my sympathies, are very catholic, and I delight in McDowell, Debussy, Richard Strauss, and Hugo Wolf."
HISTORY VII.—"My parentage is very sound and healthy. Both my parents (who belong to the professional middle class) have good general health; nor can I trace any marked abnormal or diseased tendency, of mind or body, in any records of the family.